Stephen
Terry, Director
Excuses
to Avoid Mission
Commentary
for the November 4, 2023, Sabbath School Lesson
"The word of the Lord came to Jonah son
of Amittai: 'Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its
wickedness has come up before me.' But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed
for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port.
After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the
Lord." Jonah 1:1-3, NIV.
The focus of our lesson this
week is the Old Testament book of Jonah. The prophet epitomizes someone going
to great lengths to avoid God's call to speak for him. As our opening text
says, he was told to carry God's word to the city of Nineveh, but Jonah instead
left by sea for Tarshish. While our lesson quarterly speaks with certainty that
Tarshish was in what is now Southern Spain, they exaggerate. Josephus
identified it with Tarsus in Cilicia, the same city Paul was from. While there
are several locations that have been suggested as possible locations for Tarshish,
either because of similarities in the name, types of cargo shipped, or the nationality
of what the sailors might have been, there is no definitive reason to reject
Josephus's account, especially rejecting it with the certainty expressed in our
lesson quarterly.
Perhaps this was done for dramatic
effect. In our day we span continents by air in a matter of hours. The distance
from Joppa to Tarsus would hardly seem adequate to us to run from God. But
Jonah did not live in our day. In his day, a trip of five hundred miles that we
could traverse by automobile in about 8 hours, depending on road and traffic
conditions, could take two and a half weeks by donkey, a typical mode of
transport for a prophet. Also, with our understanding of God as omnipresent, we
are far removed from the time when gods were thought to be geographically
limited with each nation having its own panoply. Battles were often contests to
see which god was more powerful over the location where the battle took place.
We see this in the Old Testament in the battles between Samaria and Aram.[i]
Defeated in battle by Samaria, the king of Aram thought that changing the
location of the battle would allow their gods to prevail. Although this did not
work for Aram, this kind of thinking may have been an important factor in Jonah's
decision to demure when tasked with traveling to Nineveh. He may have feared
God would not have the ability to protect him there. He would be on another god's
turf.
Our lesson discusses the anemic
excuses of discomfort and inconvenience but fails to adequately account for the
genuine fear that quailed Jonah. If we were to search for a modern equivalent,
traveling to Tehran in Iran and walking through its streets calling for the
people to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus[ii]
would be close. In the time of the apostles, it was not Nineveh that epitomized
wickedness but Rome, and Peter carried Christ's message to Rome. That city had beheaded
Paul and persecuted Christians. According to early Christian legend, Peter was
fleeing persecution in Rome when God appeared to him and asked him where he was
going? (Quo Vadis?) He reminded Peter that he still had many people to
claim in Rome, and Peter returned to the city to bring Christ to more souls and
was in the end crucified upside down. Who would go to Tehran like Peter went
into Rome? Maybe no one would. We are not the Christians of the first and
second centuries.
Early in the fourth century a
dramatic change took place in Christianity. We transitioned from spreading the
message of Christ by witness of our personal experience with Christ, bolstered
by relevant scripture to coercion by political and military force. It is the
foundation that led us to subjugate the entire western hemisphere to European
kingdoms under the fiction of converting heathen lands to Christian ones. It
worked so well that it was also used later in subjugating the African continent
and Oceania in the Pacific. Christians transitioned from the ones being
martyred for their faith to the ones forcing others to be martyred who refused
to accept the new faith. This was hardly the teachings of Jesus we were told to
propagate.[iii]
He told us to teach what he taught. Instead, we used Christianity as a tool to
build empires. We pretended to be searching for lost souls, but we enslaved
those souls to search for gold to further empower empire. If as Tertullian said
in his "Apologeticus" that "the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church,"
what then is the blood shed by Christians seeking to establish earthly dominions,
not only over non-Christian peoples but even over other Christian denominations?
Surely, the blood of all these souls cries out from the ground to God.[iv] Do
not all of those who enjoy the rewards reaped from such evil share as well in
the curse of Cain, the first murderer?
The deeper we wade into such
bloody pursuits, the greater the curse we bring upon ourselves until we can
find no other way forward than by coercion, and if necessary, destruction of
those who stand in the way. We place a cross on our buildings, around our necks,
and on our vehicles and believe that somehow absolves us of sin. But our hearts
are hearts of stone toward all who will call out greed and rapaciousness for
what they are. We fail to see the signs that the glory has departed.[v] As
Seventh-day Adventists, we often make the claim to be one of the fastest growing
denominations, but we are plagued with the curse as are the others who claim
the name of Christ. Our tepid, single digit percentage growth figures are
nothing to boast about. If we weren't still pushing our denomination down the
inroads made by colonialism, growth might even be negative. Much of the First
World has come to see Christianity for what it became in the fourth century, an
institution dedicated to the pursuit of earthly power and its preservation.
This week sees the celebration
of Reformation Day in Europe as we remember Martin Luther nailing his "95
Theses" to the door of the Wittenberg Church. He understood that the Christian
Church had gone astray. He saw the poverty of the European peasantry, a
peasantry that the Papacy nonetheless continued to bleed of offerings to build the
opulent Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, begun in the early sixteenth century
and completed over a century later. Luther opposed the friar, JohannTetzel,[vi]
who sold indulgences to those who could least afford them, telling them that
their relatives would remain trapped in purgatory if the funds were not paid to
free them. Extortion is something the modern church is sadly very familiar with.
Pay to play is the order of the day. Those who pay can have a limited say. Those
who do not are marginalized. But we have lost sight of the power of the Kingdom
of God when we sell out to the power of money. We cannot have both.[vii]
We like to point to the size of
our various denominations as proof of God's blessing. But if numbers are the
name of the game, then we should call ourselves the Christianity of the Broad
Gate for the numbers we are willing to accommodate to grow our earthly power
base and the flow of money that goes with it. That church appears more powerful
than the Christianity of the Narrow Gate which only has "seven thousand"
members.[viii] The
Church of the Narrow Gate may appear feeble and even defective based on their
failure to obtain earthly power and wealth. They have not trod the halls of
government seeking endorsement of their agenda. They do not seek rivers of gold
to advance their work. They know the work is the Lord's, and he knows every
need in advance and will provide.[ix] We
wonder why we do not see such miraculous provision today. Could it be because
we find it easier to ask for handouts from parishioners than to have the
patience to ask God and await his response?
It is this separation from God
and the relationship he had with first century Christianity that fills us with
fear not unlike the fear that Jonah felt when God directed him to Nineveh.
Fearing for his life if he were to confront the Ninevites over their sins, he
felt safer fleeing, only to discover that his life could be forfeit anyway. We live
with an illusion that we can control whether we live or die. Many try to eat
and drink as healthily as they can. We wear seat belts and have airbags in our
cars. We exercise to slow our natural aging process. But in the end, barring
the Parousia, death comes to us all at a moment we rarely know in advance. Therefore,
it makes little sense to spend our lives in fear of something that comes to us
all. Instead, let us seek real relationship with God. Instead of power and wealth,
let us seek love and compassion which will drive out fear.[x] In the
end, love is the way, not earthly wealth or power, not coercion or conquest.[xi]